Compare And Contrast John And Annie Dillard

Nat Turner and John Brown are both noted, as being symbols of American reform. Leaders of abolitionist groups, who went on a killing spree believing they were given “extraordinary powers from above” and were executed for their strong beliefs of anti-slavery. Their gruesome murders could easily attract followers and spark interest in others to write their biographies.

Every Christmas there was a massive dinner held in a seemingly never-ending dining hall. It was lavish and spacious with a table that was as long as a river and was decorated with many different table cloths and decorations. The ceiling of the hall was covered in chandeliers and the floor was filled with different groupings of people: the sick and injured, the children, to those who wanted to dance or participate in games or various others who gathered in separate sections throughout the hall.

Annie Dillard’s essay “Sight into Insight” emphasizes how one must live in the moment and not sway towards others opinions in order to gain accurate observations on a situation. She uses nature as a prominent theme in her essay to represent the thought of looking past the superficial obvious in order to go deeper to where the hidden beauty rests. Dillard wants the reader to realize in order to observe clearly you have to live in the moment and let go of the knowledge you think you know on the situation. Dillard uses the example of her “walking with a camera vs walking without one” (para.31) and how her own observations differed with each. When she walked with the camera she “read the light” (para.31), and when she didn’t “light printed” (para.31).

Indecision: the inability to make a resolution effectively (Houghton 690). Beauty: physical attributes that pleases aesthetic senses (Houghton 120-121). Time: the infinite progress of circumstances in the past, present, and future regarded as one entity (Houghton 1418). In Toni Morrison’s Beloved, the humming bird embodies each of these intangible concepts even though its image is only illustrated twice.

In the auto-biographical excerpt from Ornithological Biographies by John James Audubon, he depicts his intriguing encounter with the wild pigeons of Ohio, while in Annie Dillard's engaging excerpt from Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, she illustrates her thought-provoking observation of the Starling roost migration. Both writers had an overriding passion that showed through in the diction, tone, and syntax of their pieces. Because of these different infatuations both authors use different literary devices that match their feelings of how they view the birds and how the birds affected them.

The peacocks become a central point of the narrator’s life. The narrator describes the appearance and attitude of these grand birds in great

The writer, Richard Louv, in his argumentative paper, Last Child in the Woods, supports his argument that relates to the separation between people and nature. To support his argument, he uses rhetorical devices in order to motivate the readers to reminisce about their past and how nature applied to it. Louv’s purpose is to manifest the feelings of the reader’s past to connect with his ideals of nature.

In his pom entitled “Evening Hawk”, Robert Penn Warren characterizes human nature by a transition between the flight of the hawk during the day and that of the bat, or the “Evening Hawk” during the night. The hawk, as it soars in daylight, portrays how humans appear in clear light of their peers, while the bat, cruising the night sky, symbolizes what humans hide within themselves. Warren effectively expresses the meaning of this poem and its serious mood by the use of diction and imagery to appeal to the reader’s perception of sight and sound.

The question of what exactly is literature comes up every time something is written or read. This question forms many of the English classes that students take all around the world, and this question dominates the literary community. So what exactly is literature and why is it so important? Literature is non-factual, with sensuous language, about particular people or events that have significance. Literature is often figurative and appeals to the emotions. During the early colonial times of America, many authors wrote about the things they experienced during that time. Two well-known authors of that period were John Smith and Anne Bradstreet. Smith gave accounts of what he experienced during that period through prose, whereas Anne Bradstreet wrote about some things that went on her life through poetry. Smith’s writings have the purpose of telling what happened and providing the facts, whereas Anne Bradstreet does tell what happened, but she also looks toward the future in her writings.

From the 1880’s into the 1960’s, a majority of American states enforced segregation through Jim Crow laws. In her story, “In My Place,” Charlayne Hunter Gault recounts an experience of hers that describe the horrifying governing principles that people had to follow and live with on a day to day basis. The ending of these principles was a task that required courageous and cunning characteristics as well as a dedicated soul. Throughout her experiences, Ms. Hunter unknowingly began the generation of a movement that would soon lead to the latter years of segregation as well as the Jim Crow laws. Although Charlayne Hunter Gault's experiences were wearisome and problematic, Hunter dramatizes her audiences experience by addressing her “caged bird”

In the fifth paragraph, Dillard describes Rahm’s appearance and juxtaposes that to vivid imagery. At the start of the show, Dillard was, “Idly paying...attention,” when she saw a “medium-sized, rugged man, dressed in brown leather, all begoggled…” who happened to be David Rahm. These mundane details describe Rahm as an average, ordinary man, who great things were not expected. By using mundane details, audience members understand how Dillard did not pay any extra attention to Rahm because he appeared to be average. However, once Rahm was in the plane, his actions demanded her attention. When Rahm started flying, he “seemed to fall down the air...streaming beauty in spirals behind him.” This example of imagery juxtaposes to the previous mundane details in order to convey how once Rahm entered the plane, he became one with it.

The short stories A Rose for Emily and Miss Brill have two characters Emily Grierson, the

In The Book of Negroes Aminata was captured, and became a slave. In The Painted Bird the young boy had to be separated from his family because of the Holocaust. Aminata’s journey through slavery was only tragic at the beginning and continuously shed the tragic tone. However, The Painted Bird’s main character’s journey remained tragic. As the story goes on he faces continuous betrayal from the villagers and because he didn’t know who to trust, he developed severe loneliness. In The Book of Negroes the author Lawrence Hill gave the reader some hope of the survival and freedom of the main character by giving her many natural skills such as knowing many languages and being a fast learner. Meanwhile Jerzy, the author of The Painted Bird tried to show the horrible truth and reality of being a Jew in the 1930s as seen by the quote “Wouldn't it be easier to change people's eyes and hair than to build big furnaces and then catch Jews and Gypsies to burn them?” (Jerzy, 105). He showed how tragic it is and how most people in that time believed Jews were evil and had to be killed. The young boy in The Painted Bird was also always lonely and had no friends because he couldn’t trust anybody, unlike Aminata from The Book of Negroes who had made many contacts. This is evidence to how Lawrence Hill gives hope of freedom for his book’s main character in contrast to the main character of The Painted Bird. The Book of Negroes setting changes always leads up to the better whereas The Painted Bird always remains

In two poems “Sympathy” written by Paul Laurence Dunbar and “Caged Bird” written by Maya Angelou talk about a poor bird that is trapped in a cage and wants to be free. It longs for everything that the free bird has but it cannot achieve it. In both of the poems, there is a use of comparisons between freedom and nature. It is also interpreted from the poems that the use of a song is a form of coping for the birds. Both of the birds sing for their freedom and sing through their pain. The two poems “Sympathy” written by Paul Laurence Dunbar and “Caged Bird” written by Maya Angelou are so similar, yet so different.

“How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.” Can love even be measured? It is such an intense feeling that can entirely transform the way that people view the world. It can be experienced more intensely for some compared to others. Elizabeth Browning and Anne Bradstreet both manifested their own intense feelings of love for their husbands in the form of poem. The quote aforementioned was from Elizabeth’s poem “How Do I Love Thee?”. Although Anne Bradstreet also composed a poem, “To My Dear and Loving Husband”, in which she expressed her uncontainable feelings of affection for her husband, Elizabeth Browning verified that her love for Robert Browning, her husband, was much stronger through her employment of spiritual comparisons to her love,